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Tuesday, October 22, 2013

What are ScripTipps?

ScripTipps are a brand new series of ebooks designed to help aspiring screenwriters absorb hundreds of professional screenwriting tips through a focused, in-depth, scene-by-scene analysis of one screenplay per book, selected for its excellence in story structure, character development, and scene construction.

Most screenwriting books teach "rules," usually derived from the theories of Aristotle and Joseph Campbell. Some might put a cute spin on these age-old storytelling guidelines and call them unique when they're really nothing more than a variation on the same old basic dramatic principles dressed up as rescued kittens.

To convince you to buy their must-have diet book, each guru insists his technique is the one and only correct way to make your screenplay "work." They'll use Star Wars and Die Hard as examples to prove all movies fit their one-size-fits-all formula, then tell you Pulp Fiction and Memento don't count because those are "art" films and you want to write "blockbusters."

That said, those types of books do have value. ScripTipps aims to build on them by delving deeper into a single screenplay, like a CliffsNotes for screenwriters.

(Not affiliated with CliffsNotes)

We won't tell you you must do what we say or you'll never sell a screenplay. We won't tell you your script will write itself in thirty days and you'll definitely sell it for a million dollars if you follow our rules. We won't use examples from a lot of different movies you haven't seen, since you'll presumably only read the ScripTipps screenplay study guides for the movies you're already familiar with.

Instead, we'll examine how the general rules of screenwriting were applied to one outstanding script. Not just the parts that corroborate certain beats of a formula, but the whole script, from FADE IN to FADE OUT.

Each tip presented in the pages of ScripTipps serves to illustrate how one screenwriting concept or trick was used effectively for that script and may or may not apply to the screenplay you are writing. As a rule, our tips should never be thought of as "rules." You get to decide what works best for you.

Five diverse titles have been released so far, at incredibly low introductory prices. Seriously. Each is over fifty pages and contains well over a hundred useful tips, but costs just a fraction of the cover price of a single issue of the (now defunct) Creative Screenwriting magazine.